Life on Mars

by Jonathan Strahan (Ed)

  Violet-eyes’s face twisted up like, Who’s the pove? and I said, “This is Vijay. He flies. Apparently.”

  Vijay stuck his hand out and she took it. “Helene Gonzales-Ginsburg,” she said.

  “I’m Dave,” I said, feeling like I was falling behind.

  “Dave Smith,” Vijay said, inches from my ear. “I should have made the connection when you told me your name. Well, that is interesting!”

  “What corp do you work for?” Helene said, pointedly.

  “Oh,” he said, airily, “I work for the auditor-general.”

  Now it was my turn to boggle. The AGs were one of the exalted heights that every player secretly aspired to. They only recruited players with absolutely, positively impeccable reps, and gave them the power to kick open the doors of any corp, any meeting, and go over its books with a fine-tooth comb and confiscate any money that wasn’t properly accounted for. They could take away your corporate charter, bust your character down to the bottom rank. You didn’t get to be an AG without playing a long, hard, tight game that made you a lot more friends than enemies. I was a pretty top dog, but Vijay was a minor god. Whoa.

  “Work for?” Helene said. “What does that mean, work for? You snitch for them for money?”

  “No,” he said. “I am a senior auditor.” We both boggled. A bit of drool actually attained separation and liftoff from my lip, forming a glossy sphere that drifted off toward one of the air-recirc vents. Senior auditor! He wasn’t just a god, he was a major god.

  Suddenly I felt very self-conscious. Vijay could buy or sell us all ten times over in MC.

  But then I realized that I could probably buy and sell Vijay ten times over in real life. It’s a kind of nasty, ungenerous thought, but it made me feel better. And worse.

  “Of course,” he said, “that’s all just for another three months.”

  Three months. Turnaround. In three months, we’d stop facing Earth and the ship would spin around to face Mars. In three months, we’d be closer to Mars than to Earth, and the light-speed lag would hit a brutal one hundred seconds, making the game almost unplayable. So in three months, the ship’s network array will cut over to Mars and we’ll all start fresh, new characters on the Mars servers.

  Yes, Martian Chronicles is big on Mars. Yes, they actually play a life-on-Mars simulator on Mars. Except, of course, on Mars, it means something, because the best lessons learned on Mars server are actually turned into policies for Mars government.

  In three months, we’d all start over as noobs in the Martian Chronicles. And three months after that, we’d touch down and we’d all be noobs on Mars. I was abandoning DBOS-Corp. Vijay was abandoning his position as senior auditor. Thousands of hours flushed down the toilet.

  “Who do you play for, Helene?” I said.

  She grinned, not looking shy at all anymore. “I’m a raider,” she said.

  We both drew back from her involuntarily, and I lost my balance and ended up standing on my head for a moment while I sorted myself out.

  A raider! They were the scum of Mars. They’d borrow a giant amount of money and use it to buy up a majority share of a corp, then they’d vote that the corp should take on their debt. Then they’d sell off all the corp’s assets to pay the debts, leaving behind a hollow shell, sucked as dry as a bug in a spider’s web. It was great for the “investors” who loaned the raiders their initial stake—they could take millions of player-hours’ worth of work and turn it into a nice fat bank balance for themselves. Was it “legal”? Well, no one would send you to jail for it. And it was an open secret that some of the biggest corps had been founded by—or had bankrolled—raiders. If an auditor caught raiders in the act, he could bust up the party, but it was all part of the game. That didn’t change the fact that I was instantly tempted to punch Helene in her movie-star nose and then push her out the air lock.

  She giggled.

  “You should see the look on your face! Come on, it’s just a game.” They always said that. “Besides, maybe I’ll change my ways when we hit apogee. Start clean on Mars as a goody-two-shoes corporate worker bee.”

  Vijay nodded. “And maybe I’ll be a raider,” he said.

  I swallowed. I wanted to say something like, “I will be a CEO. I have always been a CEO. It’s all I ever wanted to be.” But “it’s just a game” didn’t allow me to say anything like that. There was one place in the world—and off the world—where I wasn’t a loser, and that was in the Martian Chronicles. I’d come to grips with the fact that I was going to have to abandon my beautiful, perfect corporation in ninety days, but only by promising myself that I’d start building a new corp on day ninety-one.

  “It’s just a game,” I said.

  The Eagle had only been finished two weeks before we boarded, the last carpets laid, the last bunks prepared, the last safety checks completed. But it still smelled like people had been sweating freely in its corridors for generations. Smelled like a cross between the locker room and the garbage-filled green canal outside of the wall of Spruce Sunset Meadows on a hot day.

  The Smell—it deserved the capital S—traveled like a sneaky fart into the Eagle’s Nest in small gusts as the colonists mustered in groups of ten through the far air lock, just as they had entered by the opposite lock. Each time the lock cycled, a little bit more of that toxic air puffed out, until the room was choking on putrescence. Dad broke off from the intense conversation he’d been having with his buddies and gestured impatiently for me to join him and led me to the lock. He had a look on his face of steadfast refusal to face reality. He was not going to admit that the spaceship we were about to take up residence in had a Smell. We were going to Mars and it was all going to be so freaking awesome that it was impossible to even take notice of any imperfection, not even a Smell with its own capital letter. No whining!

  Mom took my hand and helped me down onto the same local vertical as them and we Velcro-shuffled our way to the lock, rip, rip, rip, a family hand-in-hand, with our space-bags slung over our shoulders, about to become pioneers, about to leave behind Earth and all its authorities and laws and rules and governments. We were going to a place where we could be Free, with a capital F, and if Free had a Smell, so be it.

  The air lock closed behind us; the equalization hiss was the only sound in the lock. There were ten of us, and I noticed that Vijay was part of our gang and managed to nod at him and he nodded back. Now that the lock was sealed, we were officially, irrevocably gone. When the International Space Agency completed its certification tour of the Eagle, they completed their duty to the citizens of Earth’s nations, and now they had no more authority over us. No one on Earth did. We were in space, and we were a new human race, free as almost no human being had ever been free. No one had any claim over us or our work or our freedom except for our peers, the people we’d elected to go to an alien world with. We were off to start anew.

  And we couldn’t arrive a moment too soon.

  Spaceships suck. You probably didn’t realize that, but they do. Spaceships are small, cramped, smelly, and crowded. Our cabin—the room that Mom, Dad, and I would spend the next six months in—was smaller than the mudroom at home, where we took our boots and coats off before going into the house. All the furniture folded away into the walls, and there was no toilet or shower. We had to share the communal toilets at the end of the hallway. Supposedly, there was one toilet for every six people, which someone had calculated was optimal. At home, we had four toilets for three people, not counting the one in the basement. And anyway, Helene did a count once we were under way and calculated that there was one toilet for every twelve people, not that any of the grown-ups would listen to her.

  The toilets had a double Smell—that putrid human smell that got worse, not better, as time went by (as though my nose was bravely refusing to get used to it, sacrificing itself by insisting on staying totally revolted by it so that I would know that I should get out ASAP), and the lesser smell of the air-freshener that squirted constantly out of little misters
around the giant vacuum cleaner head that we stuck our butts into. That was like the smell of bubble gum, times one million, and it clung to your clothes after you used the head so that you smelled it for hours.

  Yes, we were pioneers. Pioneers had never had it very comfortable.

  “They drove covered wagons across America,” my Dad said. “They were killed by bandits, by Indians, by disease. They starved. They baked. They froze. They drowned.” Dad’s grandparents came to America from Spain and Holland. They were middle-class architects who met at university and married and moved to San Diego because they wanted to live by the Pacific Ocean, and they did for most of their lives, retiring to Arizona just before most of San Diego ended up underwater. The closest anyone in my ancestry had come to a covered wagon was a business-class seat on a British Airways 777 to LAX.

  “Yup,” I said. “They sure did. Nevertheless, Dad, you have to admit that this ship is kind of crappy. None of the carpets are laid straight. Half the doors don’t close right. Your bed falls off the wall every time you fold it out.”

  He grinned a little. “Yeah, okay, it’s not exactly the Queen Mary. But it’s not supposed to be. It’s supposed to get us from Earth to Mars in one piece. If you don’t like the room, there’s always the lounge.”

  Junior Colonists (yes, seriously, “Junior Colonists”) had their own lounges, three of them, one on each deck. These were comparatively large spaces in the center of the ship, where there was almost no gravity. The Eagle was a big spinning doughnut, with lots of centripetal force—which feels a lot like gravity—around the edges, and almost none in the middle. The floaty parts in the middle were mostly shunned by grown-ups, who found them a little ulpy-gulpy and were prone to losing their lunches in the middle of our play areas. That was fine by us.

  The JC lounges were pretty big to start with, but the absence of gravity made them even bigger, because it meant that we could use the ceilings, walls, and middle as functional space, and we did. At any time of the “day” or “night”—the ship had a twenty-four-Martian-hour clock that the colonists stuck to—you’d find it full of kids, most of us in our teens (the little ’uns had supervised play areas that parents took turns overseeing). We’d be flying around the space with fins on our hands and long bungee cords around our waists, or we’d be tethered to something, with our faces masked by goggles and our hands running up and down virtual keyboards suspended in midair.

  I never gamed with goggles and virtual keyboards at home, but then, I never had to. My Martian Chronicles competition had all been physically separated from me, but now they were literally on every side of me, and if I’d used even a small screen, dozens of people would have been able to shoulder-surf me.

  “Good morning, boss,” Helene said, her voice so clear through my headset that she might have been right beside me. Then she tapped me on the shoulder and I shoved my goggles up on my forehead and realized that she was right beside me, floating in space sideways to me, lazily sculling the air with her hand-fins to keep herself from drifting away on the air currents. I suppressed a scowl.

  “Good morning, Helene. Why have we abandoned operational security on this fine day?”

  Helene was supposedly going straight. She had vowed that she would give up raiding forever once we made Marsfall, and go into legit business. This had cheered Vijay and me no end, and, at Vijay’s insistence, I had given her some minor status in DBOS-Corp, so that she could get some experience working for a living instead of destroying things. But she was a total loose cannon. She knew that we only talked business through the game to avoid being overheard. The game had good crypto protecting our conversations, something that was totally lacking in the cheek-by-jowl (by-butt-by-knee) atmosphere of the JC lounges.

  But she wanted to actually talk, face-to-face.

  “You’re supposed to have been this big deal raider,” I said. “How did you survive? You’ve got the secrecy instincts of an elephant.”

  She shrugged, which caused her to start spinning in slow circles, which she seemed to enjoy. She’d shaved her head after the first day in space and kept it clean to the scalp, something that a lot of other kids had done since. “I suppose I managed to keep it on the downlow when it mattered and ignored it when it didn’t.”

  “This is exactly the kind of thing that’s going to get you in trouble when you go to work for some corp Mars-side,” I said, aware that I was lecturing, but unable to stop myself. “Companies need to have policies; employees need to obey those policies. It’s fine to have ideas of your own, to try to get them circulated within the company and adopted. But you can’t just go rogue whenever an idea comes into your shiny bald head.”

  She rubbed her gleaming noggin—she must shave it every day to keep it so shiny. “You seriously get off on this? Seriously? Role-playing that you’re some bigshot in a suit telling other people what to do and amassing a fortune?”

  She’d hinted many times that she thought that straight Martian Chronicles players were suckers and drones, but this was the first time she’d come out and said it to my face. She had that same lazy smile and didn’t seem to be intending offense, but it got my back up. I swallowed a couple times. “I get off on making things. I pay a good salary to people to help me create amazing things that succeed, that make money and make people happy. Making things together requires that you give up some of your individual freedom in order to help the company succeed. If you don’t want to do that, you shouldn’t take a job.”

  “Okay,” she said. “I won’t take the job. Thanks for the memories!” She gave no impression of being upset. She never showed much emotion beyond a kind of lighthearted, detached amusement.

  I was so shocked that I just watched her grab hold of her bungee, use it to pull herself to the bulkhead, where she could get her legs coiled under herself, and then push off and go sailing away through the lounge, dodging and weaving between the players with their goggles, and the other fliers who were generally a lot less reckless than she was.

  Vijay plucked his way along the wall to me, taking dainty, quick Velcroized steps that seemed ridiculous but actually got him around the space with a lot of speed and control. “What was that?” he said, drawing level with me and stopping his motion with a single finger pressed lightly against my shoulder.

  I became aware that I was snorting hot air from my nose like a cartoon bull with a head cold. I made myself stop. “She quit,” I said. “Because I asked her to adhere to corp policy.” I shrugged my shoulders. “I guess there’s no helping some people. She must have been born to be a raider.”

  Vijay pressed his lips together and managed to look both disapproving and nonjudgmental at the same time. I don’t know how he did it, but he did. After a week on the Eagle, Vijay seemed to have worked out where all the angles were—he was bunking in a hardship-case dorm with thirty other poves, but he knew which dining room served the biggest portions, which gangways were fastest, which viewing ports were most likely to be free.

  No one apart from Helene and I talked to him. We might have been the only ones who saw him; peoples’ eyes just slid over the poves like they were invisible. Vijay never gave any sign that he minded. He used his invisibility to get into places where we couldn’t go, and he always had a fun adventure—what he called a “good wheeze”—up his sleeve.

  “Well, I suppose she’ll have to figure it all out when we get to Mars, anyway,” he said. “As will we all.”

  “What does that mean? I know how to build a corp. I’ve done it before. I’ll do it again.”

  “But you’ll be a different kind of person on Mars than you were on Earth. You’ll be an immigrant. A newcomer. You won’t have any assets. You will be a pove, if you’ll forgive the expression.”

  I had never called him a pove. I was raised better than that. But we both knew that he was a pove and I wasn’t.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” I said. “I can’t be a pove.”

  “Why not? If you don’t have money, you are poor. You have poverty.
You are a pove.”

  What a stupid day this was turning out to be. First Helene’s temper tantrum and now Vijay was trying to needle me. “In the first place, no one is an immigrant on Mars. An immigrant is someone who comes to your place—your country or planet—to live. But Mars is our country. Mars, Inc. and its stakeholders—that’s us—own it.

  “In the second place, a pove isn’t someone who’s poor. A pove is someone who refuses to stop being poor. They want handouts, not work. Their governments have told them that they have the right to food and shelter, so they want what’s theirs by right.”

  Now, I had heard and said these words hundreds of times. They were part of every civics class I’d ever taken. They were repeated several times a day through the Mars, Inc. orientation. But I have to say, I never really thought about what it would be like to hear those words if you were a pove. Not until they came out of my mouth on that day.

  I felt the blush burning in my cheeks. “I mean, Vijay, not you, obviously. Obviously you want to work, you want to get out, and see, you did! You’re smart and motivated. That’s how you became an auditor. It’s how you got to get on the Eagle.”

  He cocked his head. “Dave,” he said. “You never asked where my parents were.”

  I swallowed. “No,” I said. “I mean, I figured that you had to be an orphan—”

  “Oh, yes, I am an orphan. That’s because when I was ten, a P&G neutraceutical plant near my village leaked seventy thousand tons of toxic fumes into the air. It killed over 95 percent of the people for two hundred kilometers around. Many of them worked at the plant, or provided services to the people who did. The company argued that the division that owned that factory was totally separate from P&G, even though P&G was the majority shareholder in it, and its only customer was P&G. Because of this, the Bangladeshi court was only able to render judgment on this ‘separate company,’ which was practically bankrupt at that point. Luckily, there weren’t many of us alive. The ones who lived got enough money to go to a good school and not to one of the bad orphanages where the survival rate is about the same as that of people living in the toxic plume of a P&G plant.”